Piano Lessons- Music Theory Lessons

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to share with you three tips for practicing scales. I’ve made quite a few videos about scales. But, Truth be known, I spend a minimal amount of time practicing scales to achieve the desired results, which is to have clean finger work, and to have mastered all the fingering of all major and minor scales and arpeggios. However, no matter how far you go with scales you can always go further. It’s endless what you can do with scales! Today I’m going to give you three tips to improve your scales. Maybe you’ve gotten in a rut. You’ve practiced your scales and you don’t know where to go next. Maybe you’re not totally happy with your finger work and you’re wondering, is there any other way to practice scales that will help to clean up your technique? Here are three techniques you can try. First of all, most of us practice scales just going up and down the piano in four octaves, an octave apart, as referenced in Hanon’s 60 Selected Exercises for the Virtuoso Pianist. That is a prerequisite for developing a good technique on the piano, particularly for playing classical styles or anything that’s technically oriented. It’s kind of like having a bag of tricks in your back pocket that’s always there when you need it, because you have scales in music pretty much all the time, in one way or another. So, what about practicing with different articulations or phrasings?

Instead of playing all legato, you could play with detached fingers in a staccato manner.

The reason this practice technique is so incredibly important is that the evenness from note to note isn’t just about the down strike of the key, but the release of each key as well. If you were to slow down a sloppy scale performance, you might hear that notes are striking together, but some notes are holding longer than others. You’ll hear haphazard lengths of notes, most likely where the thumb or finger crossings happen. By playing in a staccato manner you can hear things more clearly. You can play with staccato fingers, or the notes can have a little bit more length than that, and still be detached. Not really staccato fingers, but not smooth and connected the way you might think of playing scales usually.

Play one hand legato and one hand staccato.

In a recent video, I talked about how playing the hands two octaves apart when practicing scales can help you to hear things better. Well, here’s another tip for you. Play one hand legato and one hand staccato. This technique really allows you to hear what’s happening. Try playing the right hand legato and the left hand staccato. This can be reversed, playing the left hand legato and right hand staccato. This is just the tip of the iceberg! You can try this technique with two-note slurs or four-note slurs as well. And you could start on the second note of the scale and do the same thing. The whole idea is that it helps you to identify where the hands play together. It solidifies your scales in a way that just playing them the same way over and over again will never achieve for you. It could be a tremendous time-saver. So, what are some other ideas? That’s just one of three tips I’m giving you today. This can keep you busy for the next six months!

Do what solves problems.

The trick is not necessarily to do every articulation on every scale. If you find you have an unevenness in an F major scale descending scale, focus on that and start working on various techniques that solve that problem on that scale. Then you’ll find that this technique will translate from one scale to other scales.

Put your scales into a musical context.

We’re all used to playing scales loud, soft, medium. What about playing scales very, very loud? Or perhaps very delicately. You can play one hand loud and one hand soft, but it doesn’t just have to be that. You could make a crescendo up, a crescendo down, or you could start at the bottom loud and make a decrescendo all the way up and all the way down. The key is not to look at scales as an abstraction completely, but to put it into a musical context. After all, when you play music you’re not playing everything straight. So, you can explore this with your scales and make them more interesting and more musical. Always strive for a beautiful sound at the piano. This is really important in your music, anyway. You can also do all these techniques or many of these techniques with your arpeggios.

Play your scales at different speeds.

I am a firm believer in playing scales to a metronome. It’s very important that you practice your scales slowly and get progressively faster, increasing the speed of the metronome one or two notches at a time. This is what assures really clean, even scales. This is an incredibly useful technique. There’s no substitute for that sort of practice!

These are some musical things you can do with scales at home to enhance your technique on the piano. I hope this is helpful for you! Let me know how these tips work out for you and feel free to contact me with suggestions for future videos! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s question is from a viewer, and it’s kind of a long one, so I want to read it to you word for word, because it really brings up such an important point. Joseph asks, “Hi, thank you for the reply to my previous question. This doubt is about Moonlight Sonata, movement number one. I went through many videos on YouTube. These recordings were a little bit different from what is written. There are sustains, very slight tempo variations, and small pauses at some points of the recordings. But these are not indicated in the notation. And I can say the majority of the portions were not in perfect tempo. Could you please explain on what basis these dynamics are made, and how to know which place we should apply these dynamics? I have seen your Moonlight Sonata pedal usage video. A big thanks for that video.” A lot of people are really confused about this: the sanctity of the score, what the composer intended. Is this authoritative? Is that what the composer meant?

Composers aren’t always the best interpreters of their music.

How could this be? Beethoven must have played his music better than anyone else. Let’s think about this. The people, for example, who write screenplays aren’t necessarily the best ones to direct, or act in it, for that matter. Just because somebody can write a play doesn’t mean they can act. So what is the analog here? If somebody is reading the lines of a play, does it have all the inflections indicated? – where to go up and where to go down, where to pause, where to go a little faster, where to go a little slower? Of course not. There are general indications in the play about the direction and the moods, but the performer fleshes out and creates the character from the words, bringing the character to life. That’s exactly what we do on the piano! The score itself, you could literally program it into a machine. It’s pretty easy to do that. If you took the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata and programmed every note exactly as it was written, the rhythm, the dynamics, everything, it would be an abomination. It wouldn’t even sound like music.

The score is just a skeleton.

The score is not the Holy Grail. It’s just what you build upon. Does this mean that you don’t play what’s written? No. You are playing what’s written, just like a great actor is saying the words that are written, but how do they say the words? There are so many ways of saying them. The same is true with playing the piano or any instrument. You’ve got to make sense out of the musical lines. Just like you have to make sense out of the words in a play. You can’t just read them flat. The same thing is true with music. Composers couldn’t possibly write in every inflection of every note. Notation doesn’t work that way. It’s impossible. That’s why we have performers.

The musical score doesn’t come to life until it is performed.

It takes the performer to make the work of art alive, and that is why you hear these nuances. Of course, there’s a limit to how far you can go before you’re just playing an entirely different piece! You want to have integrity to the score, absolutely. Know that score, and know what to play. But that doesn’t mean that a musical line that doesn’t have any dynamics is going to be flat all the way across. No, it will have a rise and a fall, just like the words in a sentence have in a play. I hope this helps you understand the implications of what a score really means.

I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.
Please feel free to contact us with any piano related questions for future videos!

Robert@LivingPianos.com
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Hi, this is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com. The subject today is, “Finding the Vehicle for Your Music”. There are some points in history when there were excellent vehicles for musical expression. Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven had the sonata form to exploit. The piano also was just coming into its own as was the symphony orchestra. This provided incredible opportunities for creative expression.

There are whole eras of history where the arts flourished such as the Renaissance.

Conversely, times like the Dark Ages offered scant opportunity for creative expression. There is another side to this aside from historical context. If you are a musician or artist, you must find your unique system of creative expression if you are going to be prolific. If you look at some of the most successful composers today, they each find a niche in which to flourish. This can be combining styles of music that have never been fused before, such as Eastern and Western styles. Or, it can involve utilizing technology in ways that haven’t been done before.

One thing that I have done incessantly since childhood, is improvisation. Since I have done this for so long, I almost always have fresh, new musical ideas percolating in my mind. When I sit down at the piano, oftentimes, things come together in ways that seem inexplicable. While I have captured some of them on recording, at this time I am developing a system of recording these musical creations to share with you.

Last night, I set up the recording gear for a test.

While I had nothing specific in mind when recording, the music seemed to come together well enough to share with you. I hope you enjoy the performance on the accompanying video. Finding the vehicle for your musical expression is half the battle of becoming productive and effective in sharing your musical ideas. I am interested in your opinion of what I am creating with technology to share my musical ideas with you, and welcome your insights into how to create a vehicle for musical and artistic expression. Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com – Your Online Piano Store.

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Hi, I’m Robert Estrin. This is LivingPianos.com. Today’s question is, “How to Solve Your Piano Fingering Problems.” Fingering on the piano is one of the most important aspects of developing a secure technique. So what I’m going to do is tell you my personal story of how I solved my fingering problem.

Did I have fingering problems on the piano?

When I was a child studying piano with my father, my fingering was atrocious! First of all, I had weak fingers. And truth be known, I didn’t practice nearly as much as many of my father’s other students. I had little hands, I didn’t practice a lot, my hands were weak and I had terrible fingering. My father struggled with me to correct all the fingerings. I took a look at some of my scores from my early teen years, and this is where the solution came in for me. I’m thinking this might be helpful for some of you as well. I got to a point where I though, “I want to solve this problem.” I had fingering problems for years, and it was always a nightmare at lessons.

I didn’t know how to solve the fingering problem, so I just wrote in the fingerings for almost every single note!

That was the only way I could know that I was going to play the right fingering. Looking at some scores from that period of time, it looks ridiculous. There are fingerings all over the place! Fortunately, my father was smart enough to always have his students use pencil, so the scores are not destroyed. That is what I went through! But after doing this for a period of time, I got to a point where I stopped writing in fingering. I almost never write in fingering anymore. It sounds like a total contradiction, but I transcended fingering such that I understood fingering in a way that I didn’t have to write them in. Now it’s not to say that I never write in fingering, but it’s really rare that I need to write in fingering anymore. I will certainly try fingering that’s printed in the score, with the editor suggestions. But if I have a fingering problem, I will try many different solutions. The vast majority of the time, I just develop a sense of fingerings that work. Truth be known, I don’t always use the same fingering in pieces I play. Because I got to a point of understanding fingering in such an intrinsic way, I don’t need to write them in anymore.

How many of you have gone through this same process?

I’ve never talked to anybody about this. I’m wondering how pianists out there who’ve had fingering problems overcame them. Has anybody gone through what I went through? It worked for me, but I don’t know if it’s working for anybody else. That is a real key. Writing all the fingerings in, being meticulous, and then getting to the point where you just understand it on such a level that you understand what fingering should be. I hope this is helpful! I would love to hear from all of you about your experiences!

I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.
Please feel free to contact us with any piano related questions for future videos!

Robert@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

Thanks for joining me here at LivingPianos.com. I’m Robert Estrin. The question today is, “Can You Catch a Virus from Your Computer?” You may be thinking of Elon Musk’s company, Neuralink. They are working with brain to computer interface technology. There have already been instances where people have controlled prosthetic limbs with their thoughts. The eventual goal is to create a symbiosis of human and machine – to interface vast amounts of knowledge directly to your brain.

Imagine if you could have all the piano works of Beethoven uploaded directly to your brain!

That would save vast amounts of practice time! Inventor and futurist, Ray Kurzweil talks about the singularity. That is when artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence. Connection of the human brain to a central computer database should soon follow. He predicts that date will be around 2045. Ray Kurzweil has been correct in his predictions in the past 86% of the time. So, this shouldn’t be taken lightly. But all of that is in the future.

What I am referring to is something that is real right now.

Scientists at the University of Arizona have found that cell phones carry 10 times more bacteria than most toilet seats. But this is only one example of how you can catch a bacterial or viral infection from devices we use every day. Consider when going to the supermarket and paying by credit card – or buying gasoline. How many other people have pressed those same buttons? Or if you are working in a shared environment with appropriate social distancing, is anyone sterilizing the printer or other shared devices? This is serious business we need to be aware of.

So, while catching a virus from your computer sounds far fetched, it’s actually happening all around us every day. It’s not just piano keys that you have to be concerned with.

The New England Journal of Medicine estimates that the Coronavirus can live for up to 3 days on plastic surfaces.

So, be sure to sterilize not just your piano keys, but any computer equipment from keyboards, to mice, as well all the shared electronic devices in your lives. Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com Your Online Piano Store.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com I’m Robert Estrin. The topic today is, “How to Transpose Music to Any Key.” Wouldn’t it be great if you could instantly play in any key? If you play jazz or popular styles of music, a lot of times a singer will come in and say, “I want to do this song, but can we take this in E flat instead of F?”, or something of that nature. How do you do that? It’s not easy! Certainly some types of music are harder to transpose than others. For example, if somebody gave you a Tchaikovsky concerto to transpose it might be difficult because there are so many notes to play. Naturally when you’re working from lead sheets or chord charts it’s a lot easier because you just change the chords. But how do you even do that?

What is the secret to transposition?

Is there a shortcut? Not really, but there are some tips that can help you. If you know your key signatures, and you can think them through, meaning you know the sharps and the flats associated with every single major scale, it makes transposition so much easier. Otherwise, on the piano, you could just go up or down and it would be the simplest thing in the world, transposing a simple chord progression in C major (with all white keys) to other keys. If you could just go up one key and everything would sound the same, it would be great! But it wouldn’t sound the same because black keys would not be in the same position. But, for example, if you know your key signature of D major has an F sharp and a C sharp, you just move your hands over those keys and it would work!

How do you go about learning key signatures?

First of all, you should practice all your major and minor scales and arpeggios. That’s a first step just so you have the technique to physically play them. Then you’ll know what the notes are. So you could start with a simple progression and play it in several different keys. That is going to go a long way toward helping you when you’re transposing music.

How I transpose is a little bit different. It will have value for those of you who are willing to put the time in. I was so fortunate to grow up in a musical household. I studied piano with my father Morton Estrin who not only was a great concert pianist, but a phenomenal teacher. I used to go to his theory classes even years after I’d initially completed them because I’d always learn something new. One of the things I learned from those classes was solfeggio, putting music into syllables, Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti, Do. If you know the solfeggio syllables, you can put them into any key! The combination of being able to hear your music, put it into syllables, and knowing your key signatures makes for instant transposition! However, it’s not so instant to master solfeggio! But, for those of you who are younger students, or people who are serious and want to really master transposition as well as composition, improvisation, and being able to play by ear, there’s no substitute for sight-singing whether you use syllables or not. It’s going to help you immeasurably making the connection between what you hear and what you play.

Try sight-singing!

Here’s the thing about piano: you can push a key down and produce a pitch without first hearing it in your head. This isn’t true with singing. It’s not true for a lot of instruments. I’m also a French horn player. On French horn, you can get so many different notes on the open horn, that you better hear what you are about to produce or it’s going to be very difficult to hit the right notes. So I recommend sight-singing. If you can spend time studying to get fluent with sight-singing, and learn your key signatures, you can put music into any key. It’s a process. There’s no way to do this instantly. There are some little tricks though.

Learn your clefs.

When I was 13 years old, I went to a music and arts camp, Camp Tomoka in the Berkshire mountains. I went to the first music session, and discovered a mishmash of instruments there. I thought there was going to be a band, orchestra, chorus etc. But when I got there, I was put into a room full of all different instruments and there were less than a dozen of us in the entire music program! There weren’t any French horn parts. I had to transpose. Of course, French horn is a transposing instrument and you must learn how to transpose. But I was only 13 years old! I found that if I had something in E-flat horn, which would be a whole step lower, I would just pretend I was in the bass clef. Sometimes I would use the thumb valve to help with transposition since it would change the valve combinations to different points in the scale. There were all kinds of little tricks I would use.

Here is another valuable technique for transposition. If you learn your clefs, not just treble and bass clef, but learn your C clefs, this is a way you can instantly transpose your music as long as you know your key signatures. Because the C clef can make any line middle C. So, if you get comfortable with all your clefs, transposition is a breeze.

These are just some ways to learn to transpose. I wish I could offer a silver bullet that would simplify transposition for you. But, if master your key signatures, and get familiar with all your major and minor scales and arpeggios, then, you are halfway there. That’s our lesson for today. I hope this is helpful for you.

I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.
Please feel free to contact us with any piano related questions for future videos!

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949-244-3729

Hi, I’m Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com. The question today is, “What is Music?” I’m going to focus on a defined part of this question because this is obviously a huge topic. If you look it up, the dictionary definition says, “instrumental or vocal writing that comprises of melody, harmony, textures, things of that nature”. Obviously, that is music. But the question I got from a viewer is, are nature sounds music? Are industrial sounds music? And it got me thinking, this is a really good question! So what defines music?

Is Silence Music?

John Cage has a famous piece entitled, 4′ 33″ which is silence for exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds. But how can silence be music? Silence is an integral part of music! Just like space, you can’t have matter without space. The same is true with music. Without the space between the notes, you don’t have anything. So yes, silence is intrinsically a part of music. So, can industrial sounds be music? If you look back to the 1930s, that’s when musique concrète originated in France. Musique concrète utilized recordings of nature and other sounds into musical compositions. So yes, nature sounds can be music, and indeed industrial sounds can be also.

Throughout history, music imitates civilization.

That’s why today you hear so much music that sounds like a factory. 20th Century music evolved to incorporate more percussive and in some ways harsh, ugly sounds because we hear that all the time – the sounds of the city, the screeching subway cars, traffic, car horns and all the rest of it. We are immersed in that soundscape and art imitates life. Go back centuries and you find the Pastoral Symphony of Beethoven as well as other similarly themed works. So yes, we can still enjoy those sounds. But there’s another aspect to this, which is the technologies of the instruments that enable producing different sounds.

As technology improves, musical possibilities expand.

The French horn imitates the human voice. Blowing through a horn is very much like singing. But what about today with computer generated music; what is that about? It’s obviously going to produce sounds that couldn’t be produced with the human voice. In medieval times or the Renaissance, music could never have been imagined to encompass the kind of sounds that a piano can create! So our technology is the piano itself. And of course, the development of the symphony orchestra. The sounds and the textures that are possible with a modern symphony orchestra couldn’t have been imagined earlier. To some extent, it’s a give and take. There’s an imitation of life and its civilization, the sounds we hear around us from nature, and manmade things. But there’s also the sounds of the instruments that can imitate that. It goes back and forth! Today, we’re in a computer age and our instruments are capable of sounds that only machines can make. The piano is the epitome and the culmination of 19th century technology. What will be the culmination of 21st century technology? Only time will tell.

That’s a simple answer for you. All sounds can be incorporated into music even though the sounds themselves aren’t necessarily music. I have sat outside and listened to the sound of birds, and naturally there are many compositions based upon birdsong, but are bird songs in and of themselves music? Are nature sounds music, or industrial sounds music? I think if you’re just listening to it, technically no, because music is created by humans. Though it certainly can be musical. Music is being created by machines now. They haven’t gotten brilliant yet, but they’re becoming pretty capable. But that’s a subject for another video!

Thanks for the great questions! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.

Robert@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is, “The Importance of Quiet in Music.” There are many aspects to this question. It’s important to be able to have a dynamic range in your playing. In fact, there’s no better way to draw in an audience than to come down very quiet. But what I’m talking about is the importance of the audience being quiet, and that’s the subject!

Play quietly to summon silence

Something that I like to do if an audience is making noise, ruffling their feet, talking, or doing things that are distracting, is to play quietly. You might think you would want to play louder to overcome the noise, but the opposite is true. If you come down in volume, the audience has to be quiet! They might even shush the person making the noise. Because they want to hear the performance! Talking during a musical performance is so annoying to everybody around, particularly if the music gets quiet. The problem is, we live in a world where music is so pervasive. There’s music playing almost everywhere. So, people are used to talking through music. It’s not only recorded music, even when there’s live music in restaurants and other places, people often talk through it.

Have respect for your neighbors at concerts.

When people who are not familiar with Classical performances go to concerts, they think it’s okay to talk. Worse yet, some people will have a piece of candy. They think somehow, if they open it slowly enough, nobody will notice. They know it’s making noise, so they’re nervous about it. They take an excruciatingly long time to get that candy open, while driving everybody around them nuts. It’s best to wait until after the performance is over to indulge in sweets.

If you have a really bad cough, maybe you should give your tickets to someone else.

Coughing can destroy a musical performance. For example, I try to post musical performances of mine on my YouTube channel. I even have a section you can check out if you want to hear some of my concert performances. But many of them don’t end up being utilized, because there’s some loud coughing right at the most delicate part of the performance. Just remember when you go to concerts, it’s an experience that you want everybody to enjoy. Make sure you can be quiet and have comfortable clothing so you won’t feel like you have to move a great deal in your seat. There’s nothing worse than a chair that squeaks! You don’t even want to move because it causes a disruption. So, check that out when you get to a concert so you can enjoy the performance, and everybody around you can as enjoy the music as well. I hope this is helpful for you! It’s seems like common sense, but not everybody has grown up with Classical music the way I have, so I think it’s important to share this. Thanks again for joining me!

I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.
Please feel free to contact us with any piano related questions for future videos!

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949-244-3729

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin with a question from a viewer. Evan asks, “How Do You Compose A Cadenza?” Cadenzas in concertos, solo pieces with orchestra typically, often have sections where the orchestra dramatically stops, and the soloist plays their cadenza. In many concertos, the cadenzas are written. Cadenzas are not just in concertos, they’re also in solo pieces sometimes. For example, in Liszt’s 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody, there’s a part near the end that says ad libitum cadenza. And indeed, many pianists play cadenzas. In concertos, the composers often write cadenzas, but just as often there aren’t cadenzas written by the composers. Sometimes, there are cadenzas that people typically play, for example Beethoven wrote some cadenzas to Mozart concertos! So, there are often choices of cadenzas to choose from. But suppose you want to compose your own cadenza.

You can hear the hands independently from one another when you play scales two octaves apart.

For example, Evan asked specifically about the Liszt 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody. I haven’t played that piece in years, but when I did, I would actually make up cadenzas on the spot! I didn’t write one, I would improvise. I don’t necessarily recommend that. But I like to improvise. So, I would challenge myself. Here’s the key with a piece like that: You want to find techniques that are impressive sounding, but not necessarily something that is hard to play. It’s best to play something that sounds difficult because a cadenza is meant to show off your unique skills. However, I’ve heard cadenzas in concertos that were so far away from the style f the composer of the concerto, that it seemed ridiculous. For example, a Mozart concerto with a cadenza that’s in a 20th century style can be disorienting. Having stylistic integrity is important with cadenzas.

Showcase what you can do.

You don’t have to do the hardest thing in the world. You can do something that sounds hard, that lays into your hands. How would you compose such a thing? Start improvising! Just make something up that is based upon the themes and play around with it. Over time, you’ll find certain riffs that you like. Start building upon those and before you know it, you’ll have a framework. From there you can flesh out a cadenza for something like the Liszt 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody. For a full fledged concerto cadenza, it’s a bit more of a task. If you’re writing a cadenza to a Haydn or a Mozart Concerto, you probably want to play something that sounds like the composer. This is no easy task. Even Beethoven couldn’t do it!

Try to have some stylistic integrity, but do something stylistically that you like.

That is always a good key not just for composing cadenzas, but for all composing. Use what comes naturally to you and you’ll be richly rewarded! I hope this is helpful for you Evan, and everybody else! Keep your questions coming in. There are over one thousand videos at LivingPianos.com. You can search for them with keywords. We’ve got everything covered for you here at LivingPianos, Your Online Piano Store. Subscribe to our videos and join everybody else having a good time here with piano. See you next time.

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949-244-3729